ECM - Sound AND Music 💫

 

I recently visited - after some years hiatus - an audiophile place using some nice gears and most of all an impressive records collection.

He invited me for some music and chatting, expressly asking to bring some disks or CDs (something I don’t really often do) and so I grabbed the three ECMs’ disk I was listening to a few hours before…

When I arrived, he let me “enjoy” an orchestral tympani infused crescendo at deafening SPL, with a level of distortion and booming seldom experienced… this appetizer forced me to handle one of my ECMs’ (I won’t disclose which one on the attached picture) and…

Three ECMs’ and… an intruder 😉

… something worth sharing happened: my friend exclusively listen to classical music on vintage nice pressings (Decca, RCA, Mercury) and after a few minutes (maybe seconds) of a nice ECM atmospheric, eerily impressionistic and dreamy soundscapes, I looked at my host face: the eyes wide shut 😳, the sweaty forehead and the thinned lips… everything suggested a cultural short circuit of-sort!

As I didn’t want to be cruel, the aural torture was abruptly interrupted by me and I felt the need to ask about my friend’s feelings: his words left me speechless i.e.- I don’t understand, really I don’t understand! and myself trying to explain the how and why - IMHO - about ECM’s raison d’etre and aesthetics, the soundtrack-like quality to moods and thoughts… but, no! my friend went ahead saying he didn’t understand, period.

Manfred Eicher’s ECM truly invented a sonic and aural world of beauty, a soundtrack to eyes wide dreaming, a safe harbor.

As a music lover, I find deep inspiration and enjoyment, as an audiophile I cherish the virtually infinite variety of timbres, tones and overtones, decays, dynamics and everything in between, falling in love for the Sound of Music.

Also if I badly failed my proselytism with my livid, victimized friend,  I’ll be forever deeply grateful to a lifetime-worth of… beauty (my limited skills don’t allow me to better argument the concept with deeper, more redundant words) to Manfred Eicher and his monumental ECM: a true world heritage… 

P.S. - The disk I used to torture my pal was the one with music score cover.

💫